Is leaving frequency of newsletter as an option a good idea?

[Zargon]

We are about to relaunch our webshop for children clothes. The new strategy for us is to be a personal shopping alternative.

One of the first things we are adding is customization options to our newsletter. Our customers will be able to tell us what they are interested in (clothes for certain ages, ecologic and fairtrade etc), and then receive a tailored newsletter to their needs and interests.

A specific option I ponder about wether I should include is the possibility to customize the frequency of the newsletter? For example, once a month, twice a month, once a week.

Is this a good idea? Or should I keep sending the newsletter once a week to everyone as we do today? Does anyone have any experience of trying out this alternative?

I'm worried that most people go with the longest frequency and I loose sales, then again we might have a more pleased audience by adding this option.

Appreciate your answers!

[janharders]

It sounds like a nice idea. What are you sending out in your newsletters? If it's just a "new products" update, it's a good way to make the customers have a say about when to remind them of your shop. If you have special offers, discounts etc, it'll probably get a little difficult: you don't want any of your customers feel "left out" because he didn't get the info. But you could take that into consideration and try to fit those important specials into a newsletter that most will receive.
If you do it, I'd be very interested in hearing how it works out and what frequency people prefer when given the choice.

[Zargon]

It's both new product updates and special offers. For reference you can see our latest newsletter here:
<snip>

Most offers are "public" so to speak, they can be seen just by visiting the webshop, so no-one is missed out in these cases.

On some occasions we send out discount codes only to subscribers of the newsletter, but we could plan to do that in the letter that everybody would get.

But I do get some problems of conflicting interests if someone for example is interested in news about Ecologic and Fair Trade clothes. Frequency option must go first in respect of peoples integrity so they will miss those news if they come in a letter in between theirs (and I will probably loose sales then).

It would be nice to hear someone with experience of trying out this. Was it successful or did you lose sales?

[edited by: buckworks at 4:51 pm (utc) on July 9, 2009]
[edit reason] No URLs please; see TOS [/edit]

[janharders]

Well, on the general news side (and the special offers that are not short lived), you could just accumulate so that the customer that gets a newsletter every two weeks will get the two weekly updates combined in one. That way, he won't miss a beat and still not get overwhelmed by your mailings.

[Zargon]

That's true, good input, thanks.

[piatkow]

In a different niche I was always concerned about webmail users getting too many newsletters and using the "report as spam" option to stop them rather than unsubscribing.

Non urgent messages I bulked up once a month, basically to remind people that we were still there. Additional newsletters were sent out as and when required for messages that couldn't wait. I tried to avoid more than two mailouts per month.

[janharders]

In a different niche I was always concerned about webmail users getting too many newsletters and using the "report as spam" option to stop them rather than unsubscribing.

I totally agree. Back when I was using Cloudmark (fuzzy checksum cloud intelligence) to stop my spam, it marked the weekly usage reports from my router as spam because people had reported those. You specifically had to instruct that router to do that and provide SMTP-server and credentials ... but I guess it's easier to hit the "this is spam!"-button than to bring up the router interface and uncheck that box ;)

[Zargon]

That's why I want to introduce this option in the first place. So for a consumer perspective I think it will be popular but is it a smart move from a business perspective? (Don't get me wrong, I think those two perspective should align for an ethical company but there are as always exceptions)

Currently we send the newsletter each week, and it drives (actually spikes) sales and conversion rates for two days every week. But what will happen if subscribers are given the option of having the newsletter more seldom? I guess I find out if I try but if I introduce this option it will be hard to take it back later so I don't want to do any mistake here.

[janharders]

Even if there were statistics, I'm sure they're pretty niche-dependent.
Try it and see what happens. Do you have figures of newsletter cancellations? Those might decrease if people don't feel like "they're sending me one every five minutes".
The worst thing that can happen is you try it and it does not work. In that case: just shut down the option and keep those that opted for longer frequencies on their speed.
You don't have to change them back, most likely outcome is imho that most people won't even bother to change it unless you promote it aggressivly.

[Zargon]

True indeed. Maybe I worry too much about this. The cancellation rates are quite low even today (1 or 2 out of ~1500 recipients every week).

What I hope for is that the ones that are truly interested (and responds to the newsletter) will keep the high frequency, whereas the others have the option of lower the frequency instead of unsubscribing in the long run.